Many readers of The Comedy of Errors notice that Egeon's
possible execution provides a dark frame around what appears to be one of
Shakespeare's most light-hearted comedies. Yet the threat of death that hangs
over Egeon in the frame plot also hangs, in the main plot, over his Syracusan
son. This threat results from Antipholus' Syracusan origins, of course, but
also--less obviously and more significantly--from the possibility that Syracusan
Antipholus is losing his mind. The Elizabethans believed that, without
correction, insanity usually led to death; for Shakespeare's audience, the deaths
of Lear and Ophelia probably seemed inevitable as soon as the characters went
mad. I shall argue in this essay that, in The Comedy of Errors,
Shakespeare uses the possibility that Syracusan Antipholus is genuinely
threatened by madness, and therefore death, to manipulate his audience's
anxieties. I shall also show how, despite the play's dependence on a classical
source, Syracusan Antipholus' descriptions of his "transformed" mind draw on
specific, Elizabethan ideas about both supernatural and natural causes of
madness.

The character's first appearance on stage, as a wanderer newly disembarked
from a ship, draws on strong cultural associations between wandering, water,
and insanity. Michel Foucault explores these associations in Madness and
Civilization when he investigates a reality behind the imaginary Ship of
Fools. Boats of mad people did in fact ply European rivers, for boatmen were often
charged with removing the insane to the countryside or to another city.[1] Foucault sees these mad boats both as a practical
solution to the social threat posed by the insane, and as a ritual laden with
significance. The water over which the mad are carried purifies them at the same
time it excludes and confines them (7-12). He relates this ritual to older
cultural material relating madness and sea-borne passengers.[2]

When Syracusan Antipholus arrives in Ephesus "stiff and weary" from his
long journey over the sea, he gives his money to his servant and sends the
servant away. He says that he plans to wander the town and look at its buildings
and inhabitants. When the only other person in Ephesus who knows his identity
leaves, Syracusan Antipholus is in the position of a lunatic released from one of
the ships of fools described by Foucault. Antipholus soon
discovers that he is
incapable of interpreting what is said to him, and the city's inhabitants see him as
mad.

His situation is the same as the parallel character's in Plautus'
Menaechmi, Shakespeare's primary source. If the resemblance
between Syracusan Antipholus and Foucault's released madmen stopped there, it
would be difficult to claim that features of the scene resemble the cultural
pattern described by Foucault. Antipholus' first soliloquy reinforces that pattern,
however, by using water as its central metaphor:

He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself. (1.2.33-38)[3]

We find the metaphor of water dissolving into water elsewhere in
Shakespeare as an expression of "losing one's self." It appears, for example, in
Richard II's deposition scene, when Richard describes himself as
melting "away in water drops!" (4.1.263), in Hamlet's famous soliloquy, "O that
this too too sallied flesh would melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!"
(1.2.129-30), and in Antony and Cleopatra, when Antony describes
himself as being like the shapes one sees in the clouds: "That which is now a
horse, even with a thought/The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct/As water is
in water" (4.14.9-11).[4] If these characters
associate their own unsettled identities or extreme melancholy with water, the
great mad characters immerse themselves in it. Lear tears off his clothes in the
driving rain and asks for the land to be submerged: "You cataracts and
hurricanoes, spout/Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd
the cocks!"
(3.2.3-4). Ophelia enters the water of the weeping brook "like a creature native
and indued/Unto that element" (4.7.179-80). The connection between water and
madness does not, of course, originate with Shakespeare. According to
Foucault, it either begins with the ritual of the mad ships, or the ships themselves
reflect an older cultural pattern: "One thing at least is certain, water and madness
have long been linked in the dreams of European man" (12).

Wandering and madness are similarly linked. Foucault outlines how the
wandering madmen of pre- and early-modern Europe typify this connection,
which reflects a reality similar to that found in the late twentieth-century United
States. In Elizabethan England, mentally-disturbed vagrants were a "ubiquitous
presence" (Rosen 153) represented in ballads by the figure of Tom o' Bedlam,
who wanders in search of his "stragling sences" (Lindsay 35). Edgar's soliloquy
in King Lear reflects this presence as well:

The country gives me proof and president
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb'd and mortified arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
Sometimes with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. (2.3.13-20)

Syracusan Antipholus also connects mental confusion and wandering when
he bids farewell to the merchant in the second scene: "I will go lose myself,/And
wander" (1.2.30-31). "Lose myself" and "wander" mean much the same thing
here, but the first phrase hints at a loss of identity, an unsettling of the psyche
that is more explicitly described in Antipholus' first soliloquy. Significantly, this
soliloquy ends by describing the effect of Antipholus' wanderings: "So I, to find a
mother and a brother,/In quest of them, unhappy lose myself" (1.2.39-40).

Wandering defines Syracusan Antipholus' character. Indeed, the first Folio
uses Syracusan Antipholus' status as a wanderer to distinguish him from his twin.
The Folio's stage directions call him "Antipholis Erotes" (1.2.S.D.), while his
brother is called "Antipholis Sereptus" (2.1.S.D.). Surreptus, or
"stolen away," was a common Renaissance epithet for Plautus' town-dwelling
twin. Erotes, on the other hand, appears only in Shakespeare's
play. Textual scholars have suggested several meanings for the name, but most
see it as a corruption of Erraticus, formed from the verb
errare, to wander (Foakes, xxvi-vii). The epithet fits the Syracusan
twin, who, like his father, has presumably traveled "in farthest Greece,/Roaming
clean through the bounds of Asia" (1.1.132-33). Ephesian Antipholus, on the
other hand, has had a settled life.

If we take "wandering" as a mental rather than physical state, the
distinction applies to the play's present action as well. Ephesian Antipholus' wife
may believe that he is wandering mentally, but despite this diagnosis and his
treatment by Dr. Pinch, the Ephesian twin remains "settled" in his sense of
reality. His situation is thus safely in the realm of error as "mistaking." Just as
various characters mistake him for his twin, his wife and Dr. Pinch mistake him
for a madman. He knows they are wrong. The Syracusan twin's situation is
altogether different. The state of mind described in the first soliloquy becomes
more unsettled in the confusing confrontations that follow. Syracusan
Antipholus never thinks the characters he meets are mistaken or mad--instead, he
doubts his own sense of reality. When confronted by the raging, jealous
Adriana, for example, Syracusan Antipholus wonders if he married her and was
unaware of it, or if he is now dreaming: "What, was I married to her in my
dream?/Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?" (2.2.181-82). This kind of
questioning continues to the very end of the play: even after most of the
problems of mistaken identity have been cleared up, Syracusan Antipholus
alludes to the possibility that he is still dreaming (5.1.376).

These are the questions of a madman, for as Robert Burton, citing Avicenna,
says, madmen "wake as others dream" (335). The wandering twin in the
Menaechmi does not ask such questions. Unlike Shakespeare's
Syracusan Antipholus, Plautus' Syracusan Menaechmus never doubts his own
sense of reality. He pretends to be insane, "adsimulem insanire" (831), rather
than thinking he is insane. Unlike
Hamlet's "antic disposition," this
pretence is never ambiguous: Plautus continually shows us the character's sanity.
When confronted with someone's inexplicable words or behavior, Menaechmus
assumes that the other character, not he, is mad.

A comparison of the confused-identity scenes in the
Menaechmi and The Comedy of Errors reveals the
difference. In the Menaechmi, the humor in these scenes often
results from arguments over who is insane. For example, in the first such scene,
a cook mistakes the wandering twin for the settled one. Syracusan Menaechmus
immediately decides that the man is insane--"certe hic insanust
homo" (283)--and when the cook insists that he knows Menaechmus well,
Menaechmus gives him money to be purified by a priest, "nam equidem
insanum esse te certo scio" (292). An argument follows over who is
sane. Neither character doubts his own sanity for a moment.

In Shakespeare's play, scenes involving the settled twin provide similar
humor, as do some scenes involving the wandering one. Yet when Syracusan
Antipholus is mistaken for his brother, he is bewildered in a way that Syracusan
Menaechmus never is. Shakespeare's wandering twin rarely argues with
characters who confuse him with his brother, and even when he does argue, the
exchange has an unsettling quality not found in Plautus. In The Comedy of
Errors' first scene of mistaken identity, for example, Syracusan Antipholus
meets his servant's twin and asks how he has completed his errand so quickly:

How chance thou art return'd so soon?Eph. Dro. Returned so soon? Rather approached too
late . . . . (1.2.42-43)

The exchange is the first in a series of unsettling disruptions of Antipholus' sense
of time. The period's "faculty psychology," which derives ultimately from
Aristotle's De Anima, associates such disruptions with the decay of
the sensitive soul's perceptive faculties, a decay that, like the decay of the
intellective soul, signals the onset of madness (Park 465-73).

G. R. Elliot describes how disrupted time gives the play a feeling of
"weirdness" absent in Plautus (95-106). While Elliot explores this feeling as a
feature of the Comedy's atmosphere, more recent scholars have
seen the play's strangeness as a representation of psychological states. For
example, in an essay on the relation of the frame plot to the interior plot of
mistaken identity, Barbara Freedman asks what it means to be recognized as
someone else. She sees Syracusan Antipholus' situation as representing "a
present persona confused with a past, denied persona--a part of the self with
which [one] no longer identifies" (367). In Freedman's reading, the play's
mistaken identities realize repressed parts of the psyche. This realization can be
frightening, and Freedman sees the play as a kind of nightmare. That the play
does not have what Harry Berger calls a "green world" (3-40) makes it all the
more terrifying: "By not removing the play's action to a magical island or forest,
Shakespeare stresses the essence of nightmare: the imagined fulfilment of
repressed fears and desires in everyday reality" (Freedman 363).

The threat of death hangs over this "farce," as does the threat of madness
that appears again in Hamlet and King Lear.
Syracusan Antipholus struggles with this threat throughout the play. When the
first confusions arise, he tries to determine their nature and includes the
possibility that he has lost his senses: "Am I in earth, in heaven, or in
hell?/Sleeping or waking, mad or well advis'd?" (2.2.212-13). In the third act, he
decides he is on earth and that witches are twisting his mind (3.2.155). He
generally adheres to this explanation for the rest of the play. When he falls in
love with Luciana, he believes he is surrendering his mind to a witch's power
(3.2.161-63). In the fourth act, he attributes various confusing offstage
encounters to "Lapland sorcerers" (4.3.11).

Antipholus has been prepared for this explanation by stories he has heard
about Ephesus, which is said to be inhabited by "Dark-working sorcerers that
change the mind" and "Soul-killing witches that deform the body" (1.2.99-100).
Significantly, no such association exists in the Menaechmi. Like
Shakespeare's Ephesus, which "is full of cozenage,/As nimble jugglers that
deceive the eye,/ . . . Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks" (1.2.97-98,
101), Plautus' Epidamnum is filled with tricksters of various kinds (260-61).
None of these is said to be practicing black magic, however, and scholars have
suggested that Shakespeare changed the play's setting to allow for the possibility
of such magic (Foakes xxix).

For Shakespeare's audience, the city would have been most familiar as a
center of pagan worship. In Acts, devotees of Diana drive Paul from of the city.
Before his expulsion, however, Paul performs a number of exorcisms. When
these exorcisms are unsuccessfully imitated by "vagabond Jews," the failed
exorcists are attacked by a possessed madman: "the man in whom the evil spirit
was leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that
they fled out of that house naked and wounded" (19.16). This failure and Paul's
successes lead to conversions and the burning of magic books: "Many of them
also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them
before all men" (19.19). In the Bible, Ephesus is associated with
magic--"curious arts"--and with madness caused by possession.

Both in the first-century Near East and in Elizabethan England, people
commonly attributed madness to possession that in turn was often attributed to
black magic. In both places, people tried to exorcise madness-inducing demons
with different degrees of success, and the successes were often conscious frauds.
Shakespeare uses an account of such frauds to create Edgar's
pretended madness in King Lear: the names of Poor Tom's demons
come from Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of egregous Popish Impostures,
to withdraw the harts of her maiesties Subiects from their allegeance, and from
the truth of Christian Religioun professed in England, vnder the pretence of
casting out devils (1603).[5] If, in
King Lear, Shakespeare used pretended exorcisms to create
pretended madness, in Twelfth Night he had one of his characters
use pretended exorcism to harass another character. Feste's exorcism of
Malvolio--"Out hyperbolical fiend! how vexest thou this man!" (4.2.25-6)--
remains comic as long as the audience feels certain that Malvolio is sane: the
scene's sinister undertone results from a vague fear that he may lose his sanity.
The parallel scene in The Comedy of Errors lacks this undertone
because, as mentioned earlier, Ephesian Antipholus' sanity is never in doubt. The
audience is free to laugh at what might otherwise be a frightening exorcism:

I charge thee, Satan, hous'd within this man,
To yield possession to my holy prayers
And to thy state of darkness hie thee straight;
I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven. (4.4.52-53)

This passage may allude to the fraudulent exorcisms described later in
Harsnett's Declaration. The earliest dates given for The
Comedy of Errors' composition, 1584-89 (Foakes xvii), would make
those exorcisms contemporary events; the latest would make them recent
history. Even if Shakespeare is not alluding to fraudulent exorcisms, his
audience probably saw Doctor Pinch much as Ephesian Antipholus does, as "a
mountebank,/A thread-bare juggler and a fortune-teller" (5.1.239-40). We
should note, however, that although Shakespeare's audience may have regarded
Pinch as a fraud or a quack, they would have seen nothing unusual in his
treatment of Ephesian Antipholus' supposed madness: "They fell upon me, bound
me, bore me thence,/And in a dark and dankish vault at home/There left me"
(5.1.247-49). The "dark-room treatment," which also appears in Twelfth
Night (4.2), was "one of the chief methods for the treatment of the insane
in both Elizabethan and seventeenth-century England" (Reed 11). Shakespeare's
audience probably took its efficacy for granted. The problem with this treatment
in The Comedy of Errors results from the sanity of the patient and
the (possible) fraudulence of the practitioner. The same is true of Pinch's
attempted exorcism. Its ridiculousness should not lead us to conclude that
Shakespeare and his audience did not believe in genuine exorcisms or in madness
caused by possession. Even a thinker as relentlessly skeptical as Thomas
Hobbes, writing in the middle of the next century, felt compelled to take
possession-induced madness seriously, if only to dispute it (142-46). Before
Hobbes, supernatural causes for mental illness were taken for granted, even by
those who favoured explanations based on physical humours. In The
Anatomy of Melancholy, for instance, Robert Burton departs from his
description of humor-induced melancholy for a lengthy "Digression of the nature
of Spirits, bad Angels, or Devils, and how they cause Melancholy" (157-79).

As the preceding example shows, belief in supernatural causes for mental
illness was not limited to the illiterate, who were less familiar with "physical"
explanations based on the theory of humours. The learned explanation for
madness was in fact more likely to be supernatural than natural (Porter 30).
Even medical doctors who ordinarily pointed to "natural" causes would, in
extreme cases, point to supernatural ones (Rosen 146). For the Elizabethans,
these causal categories were not contradictory. The Bible lent authority to
supernatural interpretations; the classics lent authority to natural
and supernatural interpretations: in the Phaedrus, for
example, Plato describes both kinds of madness (265A). Throughout the Middle
Ages, the idea of natural causes coexisted with that of supernatural intervention
(Clarke 82). By the late sixteenth century, learned discussions of madness often
focused on distinguishing between the two explanations (Kocher 297-305).

In his struggle to understand what is happening to him, Syracusan
Antipholus wavers between the two explanations. Generally, he provides a
supernatural explanation, but this explanation is itself bound up with the physical,
for the play continually connects mental transformations to physical ones.
Syracusan Antipholus' initial description of the inhabitants of
Ephesus--"Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,/Soul-killing witches
that deform the body" (1.2.99-100)--makes this connection, as does the following
exchange between Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio:

Syr. Dro. I am transformed, master, am I not?Syr. Ant. I think thou art in mind, and so am I.Syr. Dro. Nay, master, both in mind and in my shape.Syr. Ant. Thou hast thine own form.Syr. Dro. No, I am an ape. (2.2.204)

Dromio's words foreshadow his later questioning of Syracusan Antipholus:
"Do you know me sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your man? Am I myself?" (3.2.72).
In this scene, Dromio's fear of transformation results from his encounter with his
twin's lover, the hideous kitchen wench who knows various "privy marks" on his
body, so "that I, amazed, ran from her as a witch./And I think if my breast had
not been made of faith, and my heart of steel,/She had transformed me to a curtal
dog" (3.2.143-45). Dromio's description of this comically terrifying encounter
immediately follows Antipholus' wooing of Luciana. Like Dromio's encounter,
this wooing also involves transformation, but what Dromio feared, Antipholus
desires: "Are you a god? would you create me new?/Transform me then, and to
your power I'll yield" (3.2.39-40).

Antipholus repudiates this wish after he hears Dromio's story. He realizes
that his desire is leading him toward madness and suicide, so "lest myself be
guilty to self-wrong,/I'll stop mine ears against the mermaid's song" (3.2.161-63).
Antipholus here wards off the enchantments of a woman he believes to be a
witch (3.2.155). At the same time, he resists the love-induced madness that
could lead him to commit the sin of self-murder.

Madness brought on by love appears so frequently in the period's literature
that we tend to think of it as a convention--something Cervantes could mock, for
example, by having Don Quixote, in the Sierra Morena, imitate Orlando Furioso
(197-203). Yet these literary madnesses reflected a
reality. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton supplies a
long list of mad, suicidal lovers from literature and then tells his readers to

Go to Bedlam for examples. It is so well known in every village, how many have
either died for love, or voluntarily made away themselves, that I need not much
labour to prove it; Death is the common catastrophe to such persons. (763-64)

Burton, who devotes almost a third of his Anatomy to love
melancholy (see Reed 106), provides what may strike us as a strangely physical
description of how such love is engendered: the beloved infects the lover through
the eyes, for "rays, . . . sent from the eyes, carry certain spiritual vapours with
them, and so infect the other party" (681). Once the infection has occurred,
Burton says, the passion lodges in lower regions of the psyche, from whence it
rises to distort the lover's senses, and, in extreme cases, drive him or her mad.

A similarly physical idea of madness appears in
The Comedy of Errors. After Syracusan Antipholus' confusing
encounter with Adriana, he asks "What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?"
(2.2.184). On one level, his question suggests a possibility not thought of by
other characters in the play: mistaken identity is responsible for their confusion.
On another level, Antipholus' question suggests an actual disordering of the
senses. Shakespeare is playing on a meaning of "error" largely lost to us, that of
"fury" or "extravagance of passion" (OED). As in Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy, in Elizabethan physical psychology,
extreme passion--an upsurge from the lower regions of the psyche--destroys the
higher faculties (DePorte 115-18). Timothy Bright's Treatise of
Melancholy (1586), for example, describes how "vehement
contemplations" disorder the senses (35).

Bright says this disordering can "cause horrible and fearfull apparitions"
(131). If not corrected, it leads to madness and death. Indeed, Elizabethan
parish records often list, as causes of death, mental states like "frenzy" and
"thought" (Forbes 117-18). Shakespeare's drama reflects the idea that
uncorrected madness is ultimately fatal; as Foucault notes in Madness and
Civilization, "In Shakespeare . . . madness . . . occupies an extreme place,
in that it is beyond appeal. Nothing ever restores it either to truth or reason. It
leads only to laceration and thence to death" (31-32).

The Comedy of Errors is not King Lear.
Nevertheless, as I have argued here, this seeming farce touches upon what would
have been a genuine anxiety for the Elizabethan audience. Syracusan Antipholus
is struggling for his mind and his life when he cries out, near the end of the play,

The fellow is distract, and so am I,
And here we wander in illusions--
Some blessed power deliver us from hence! (4.3.40-43)

Such outcries are comic because the audience is aware of the cause of Syracusan
Antipholus' confusion. But however faint, the anxiety produced by fear of
madness remains, darkening the play's entertaining confusions.

Bright, Timothie. A Treatise of Melancholie. Containing the causes
thereof, & reasons of the strange effects it worketh in our minds and bodies: with
the physic cure, ad spirtuall consolation for such as have thereto adjoined an
afflicted conscience. London: Thomas Vautrolier, 1586. Facsimile.
The English Experience 212. Amsterdam: Da Capo P, 1969.